Those of you who follow the work of The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews, often called the “dean of education reporters,” know that for the past few years he’s been obsessed with two subjects—high school college-preparatory programs (Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate) and the Knowledge is Power Program charter schools, otherwise known as KIPP.

Work Hard, Be Nice, which takes its title from the motto of KIPP, begins with two young teachers, fresh out of college, who were sent as part of the Teach for America program to two dysfunctional schools in Houston. Like many new teachers before and after them, they floundered and seriously considered leaving teaching altogether. They were lucky enough to stumble on a couple of master teachers—Harriet Ball and Rafe Esquith (author of There Are No Shortcuts)—who gave them a different vision of what was possible in a classroom.

From Mathews’s account it sounds as if KIPP founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg drained Ball and Esquith of every piece of teaching expertise they could, first to improve their own teaching and then to conceive of a new kind of school—one that would provide students with direct instruction in what they need to know but that also would introduce them to the fun and intellectual excitement of seeing new sights and learning how the world works. Bull-headed and confident, Levin and Feinberg worked through two difficult school system bureaucracies (Houston and New York) to found two successful middle schools.

The book ends with the rapid expansion of KIPP and the promise of an even more substantial expansion in the future. Mathews will be following that expansion, and we can look forward to a second book, which will explore in detail whether and how KIPP’s approach can work on a large scale.

KIPP’s success directly confronts the myth that schools cannot help poor children and children of color learn—or, at least, learn as much as middle-class kids. It would be wrong to underestimate KIPP’s importance on this score. When Levin and Feinberg started, just about the entire education establishment had pretty much settled on the notion that poverty was too great a hurdle to expect schools to overcome. Poor kids hear fewer words, know less stuff, are too distracted by family worries, and generally aren’t as smart as middle-class kids, the argument went—and, it continued, there was little schools could do to counter that.

Levin and Feinberg proved that argument wrong.

KIPP takes in poor children and children of color and gets them engaged and learning, in part by recognizing that students need clear, systematic, explicit instruction in important things. They need to learn basic facts about geography, history, science, and literature, and they need to learn their multiplication tables in order to be able to learn higher math. Part of KIPP’s approach is to help students learn those things through catchy and enjoyable chants and songs. Having that background knowledge firmly ensconced in their memory allows students to think about other things. (For an explanation of why learning basic facts is important, see fellow Britannica blogger Dan Willingham’s wonderful new book, Why Don’t Students Like School?)

So, for example, when on KIPP’s first field trip to New York, a chance opportunity allowed a KIPP student to speak with Justice John Paul Stevens, the student’s knowledge of Supreme Court cases allowed him to ask how Stevens would have ruled in Miranda v. Arizona, a pretty sophisticated question for a middle schooler. Some have argued that KIPP’s success derives from the fact that KIPP parents are somehow more motivated and different from other poor parents. Even if this were true, it turns out that there are many more of these “striving” parents than some might have predicted. The waiting lists for KIPP and KIPP-like schools are substantial and growing. It turns out that poor parents want their kids to learn a lot in school just as much as middle-class parents do. They often don’t have the wherewithal to help them as much as middle-class parents do, though. And that’s where schools need to come in. The KIPP schools demonstrate one way that can happen.

Mathews says that KIPP schools are the best schools in America. I admire KIPP, but I have my own loyalties to the high-poverty and high-minority schools I have written about as part of my work for The Education Trust (see It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools published by Harvard Education Press). I think the schools I profiled are the best in America, but I acknowledge that Mathews makes the case for KIPP.

And the important thing is that success anywhere deserves to be studied for the lessons it has for the rest of us.